Hello and welcome to On the Ledge podcast.

Surprise!

Yes, I've got another one of my occasional, occasional episodes

coming out into your ears today. I'm Jane Perrone, your host. If you want to hear me more regularly

than these very, very occasional On The Ledge updates, then do check out the Deep Dive podcast for

Scribe-Hound Gardening, which is the other podcast that I make. Every week it comes out on

a Thursday. It's not exclusively about indoor gardening, although that does come up in some episodes,

but it's where I interview people who are fellow Scribehound gardening writers covering all aspects

of the garden world. I'll put a link in the show notes if you want to check it out or just

search for Deep Dive and My Name. And onto this week's show, I am delighted that I got the chance to interview Avery Row again.

You may remember Avery from my episode about the wonderful Tradescantia family, but Avery has many strings to their bow.

And one of these other strings is a ponchant for brilliant academic research,

the kind of stuff that answers questions that we really need answers to. And in this case,

it's the tricky old question of drainage in pots. Back in the day, we were always told that adding a layer of

rocks to the bottle of a pot or gravel would aid with drainage. And then fashions changed,

thoughts changed, and suddenly everyone was decrying this practice as not working. So, Avery, fascinated by this topic as somebody who

grows a lot of potted plants, wanted to find out some scientific grounding for this particular

question. And being Avery and being very thorough, rather than just maybe reading a few books,

Avery decided to research and write a scientific paper for an academic journal.

You can go and read Avery's paper for yourself.

It's been published in a journal called Plaus.

This is a non-profit publisher of open access journals in the sort of

...